Oracle Blog

Organizing Principles by jb

Monday Feb 12, 2007

Adaptive Path is a user experience consultancy in San Fransisco. They put on a conference about Managing Experience through Creative Leadership and today was day one. As stated by co-president, Jesse James Garret, they (AP) had a hunch there was a community around this topic (Managing Experience) that didn't really get a chance to gather that often. Based on the energy in the room, the conversations and the questions, I'd say that hunch was right on.

I am here with several colleagues and my manager. After the conference we are planning to meet and discuss what we can take away from our two days here to improve how we move forward to manage the web experience.

Jesse started the day with a great context setting speech. The clear message was that the product is the experience and people emotionally attach to that.

Lou Carbone, the keynote speaker of the day, spoke of a new world order. We need to take a different approach to business. We need to account for emotion. People respond to our products and our services as if they are other people. We need to consider how our products and services make people feel. This is not the way things have been done in the past.

Everyone in the room had a different set of challenges, but it's clear that an understanding is beginning to emerge. We need to structure things in our organizations to account for the people that use the product. We need to think about how they feel. How a customer feels is key to their loyalty to the company. Loyal customers keep companies in business.

It's important to keep driving this forward and key for this community to continue to cook up strategies and tactics that help us keep the customer's feelings in the product development cycle. It's a great challenge.